Facebook names Schroepfer as its new CTO, as infrastructure takes center stage

Facebook has appointed Mike Schroepfer as its new chief technology officer, AllThingsD reported Friday. Schroepfer has been vice president of engineering since 2008. Before coming to Facebook, he was vice president of engineering at Mozilla.

Schroepfer is keenly aware of Facebook’s hardware and software needs. In 2009, a few months before Facebook opened up about building its own data centers, he spoke about Facebook’s uniquely high user demand, saying that users were spending 8 billion minutes on the site a day at the time. Since then, he has worked on launching the Timeline product and adding a Facebook engineering New York outpost.